Ioannes Roncalli’s motu proprio Rubricarum instructum (25 July 1960) announces and promulgates a “new corpus” of rubrics for the Roman Breviary and Missal, replacing the existing rubricial structure (including those stemming from St Pius X’s Divino afflatu and the 1955 decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites), abrogating contrary decrees, privileges, and even immemorial customs, and aligning all local calendars and propers to this central reform, under the pretext of simplification and pastoral burden. In reality, this text is the juridical prelude and spiritual manifesto of the liturgical demolition: the self-authorized dismantling of organically developed apostolic worship and the quiet enthronement of a new anthropocentric cultus that prepares and legitimizes the later revolution of the “conciliar sect.”

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The Rubrical Coup d’État against the Roman Rite

From Organic Tradition to Technocratic Engineering

At the factual level, the motu proprio constructs a narrative:

“Rubricarum instructum, quo publicus Ecclesiae cultus ordinatur ac regitur… pluribus itaque emendationibus, variationibus et additamentis… totum rubricarum systema abunde succrevit, non semper vero systematico ordine servato, et non sine primitivae perspicuitatis ac simplicitatis detrimento.”

Translation: “The rubrical code… grew abundantly with many corrections, variations, and additions… not always preserving systematic order, and not without loss of primitive clarity and simplicity.”

This framing is the key ideological gesture. The organically developed rubrics of the Roman Rite—from Gregory the Great, through the Middle Ages, through Trent, to St Pius X—are redefined as an unwieldy, confused accretion in need of rationalist systematization. But:

– The Council of Trent explicitly safeguards the ancient Roman rite and immemorial usages, condemning arbitrary innovations and reserving changes to true necessity and to the Apostolic See, and even then with a spirit of *tutiorism* regarding tradition (Session XXII, can. 9). Pre-1958 theology understood “necessity” not as aesthetic preference for “simplicity,” but as defense of dogma and reverence.
– St Pius V, in Quo primum, did not treat the Roman rite as a technocratic product, but as a received inheritance to be preserved; he confirmed immemorial usages (of 200+ years) and forbade fabrication of new rites. He codified to protect, not to re-invent.

Roncalli, by contrast, speaks like a liturgical engineer: “system,” “order,” “simplicity,” “uniformity,” “codex,” “reduction.” This is the language not of Fathers and Popes safeguarding a living tradition, but of bureaucrats flattening it.

The decisive rupture appears in points 1–3:

1) A completely new rubricial code, in three parts, binding from 1 January 1961 for all following the Roman rite.

2) Simultaneous suppression of:
– General rubrics of Breviary and Missal;
– The additions and variations linked to St Pius X’s Divino afflatu;
– The general decree of 23 March 1955;
– All decrees and responses of the Sacred Congregation of Rites not conforming to the new schema.

3) The sweeping clause:

“Item statuta, privilegia, indulta et consuetudines cuiuscumque generis, etiam saecularia et immemorabilia, immo specialissima atque individua mentione digna, quae his rubricis obstant, revocantur.”

Translation: “Likewise statutes, privileges, indults and customs of any kind, even secular and immemorial, indeed those most special and worthy of individual mention, which stand in the way of these rubrics, are revoked.”

This is not organic purification. This is an absolutist act that treats immemorial tradition—recognised by prior Popes as a source of right in the liturgy—as an obstacle to be bulldozed. It is a juridical self-authorization of rupture, an implicit denial of the mind of Quo primum and the perennial principle that *consuetudo apostolica* (apostolic custom) has binding force.

It inverts the logic of Pius IX’s Syllabus (esp. 19, 21, 55), which defends the rights and stability of the Church’s order against arbitrary civil power. Here, a neo-ecclesiastical bureaucratic will elevates itself over the liturgical inheritance itself. What Pius IX condemned in liberal states—a State claiming “a right not circumscribed by any limits” (prop. 39)—Roncalli’s act implicitly imitates in the liturgical sphere.

Subversive Language: “Simplification” as Dissolution of Sacrality

The linguistic register of the document betrays the underlying mentality.

Key features:

– Technocratic abstraction:
– “corpus rubricarum,” “in meliorem formam redactus,” “unicum textum,” “ad uniformitatem praecavendam”.
– This is cold administrative vocabulary. There is no adoration, no trembling before the *Unbloody Sacrifice*, no awareness that every rubric exists to protect the confession that Christ the King truly offers Himself on the altar.
– Managerial pastoralism:
– The changes are justified “intuitu praesertim multorum sacerdotum, qui in dies magis magisque pastoralibus sollicitudinibus onerantur” – “having in view especially the many priests increasingly burdened with pastoral cares.”
– This is the proto-conciliar cult of “busy clergy” for whom divine worship must be shortened, streamlined, made efficient.
– Weak exhortation:
– The text “paternally exhorts” priests to make up with “greater diligence and devotion” for what has been abbreviated.
– This is an almost cynical aside: first contract the Office “paulisper” (step by step), then pretend that private goodwill will compensate for juridically imposed loss of prayer.

The contrast with integral Catholic language is stark:

– Pius XI in Quas primas thunders that peace is only possible in the reign of Christ the King, and he insists on the public, social, and liturgical proclamation of that reign. His vocabulary is dogmatic and regal, not technocratic.
– Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu and Pascendi diagnoses the Modernist drive to “adapt” and “update” as the corruption of dogma and cult under the pretext of historical method and pastoral need. Here we see precisely this Modernist vice entering the heart of worship under a cloak of continuity.

The tone of Roncalli’s motu proprio is bureaucratically courteous but theologically bloodless. Silence roars where a Catholic Pope would speak:

– No reference to safeguarding dogma through the stability of rites.
– No reference to the reality of the Sacrifice or the unique dignity of the Divine Office as the voice of the Bride of Christ.
– No fear of touching immemorial customs; instead, they are relegated as dispensable legal epiphenomena.

This silence is damning. In the theology of the Church, liturgical forms are not neutral containers; they are doctrinal witnesses. To reduce them in the name of a managerial “simplification” is to relativize their doctrinal function. This is a practical Modernism, even when clothed in Latin.

Theological Rupture: Attack on the Principle of Liturgical Tradition

From the perspective of unchanging Catholic doctrine prior to 1958, several points of grave theological disturbance appear.

1. Arbitrary Revocation of Immemorial Customs

The motu proprio’s blanket revocation of “even immemorial” customs contradicts the spirit (and, in practice, the respected application) of Quo primum and the common teaching that immemorial liturgical custom has the force of law and is not to be overthrown without gravissimus causa.

Integral Catholic principle:

– Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief). To erase settled liturgical customs en masse is to endanger the regula fidei they embody.
– The Councils and Popes traditionally reform by correction and clarification, not by sweeping away whole strata of venerated practice without doctrinal necessity.

Roncalli’s logic implies that what was held for centuries as sacred can be summarily set aside for “simplification.” This is a direct prefiguration of the later claim—under the Church of the New Advent—that the Roman rite may be replaced by a manufactured rite. The theological assumption: form is negotiable, continuity is optional.

2. Subordination of Worship to Activism

The explicit rationale for contracting the Divine Office is the burden of “pastoral cares” on priests. This is the inverted hierarchy of goods that pervades post-1958 structures:

– The first duty of the priest is the worship of God: the *Most Holy Sacrifice* and the Divine Office prayed in the name of the Church.
– Souls are saved not by restless busyness, but by grace merited and applied above all through that worship.

By justifying contraction of the Office to allow priests to “do more,” Roncalli introduces a utilitarian calculus into the heart of the Church’s official prayer. The Office ceases to be treated as the spine of sacerdotal life and becomes a negotiable workload. This is precisely the mentality condemned by Pius X when he exposes Modernism as subjecting supernatural realities to immanent “pastoral” criteria.

3. Minimization of Patristic Formation

Roncalli admits that readings from the Fathers will be “aliquantisper quandoque minuatur” (somewhat reduced at times), and answers with a pious wish that clerics read the Fathers privately.

This is theologically perverse:

– Public lectiones Patrum in the Office are not an optional decorative element. They are the ordinary, magisterial transmission of the Fathers in the Church’s official voice.
– To reduce them in the binding liturgy while relegating them to voluntary private reading is to weaken the objective, ecclesial formation of clergy and faithful in patristic doctrine.

Meanwhile, the same era opened the doors of seminaries and theological faculties to precisely those historical-critical and Modernist authors condemned in Lamentabili and Pascendi. The practical pattern: less Fathers at the lectern, more “experts” at the microphone.

4. Centralization as Precondition of Revolution

The motu proprio insists:

– A single new code for all;
– Suppression of divergent customs;
– Mandatory alignment of all diocesan and religious calendars;
– Control of publishers through the Sacred Congregation of Rites’ “peculiares instructiones.”

This hypertrophic centralization is not in itself heresy, but it is the ideal instrument for doctrinally deviant leadership to impose universal corruption once it occupies the structures.

The irony is bitter:

– Pre-1958 Popes defended central authority to guard Tradition.
– Roncalli and his successors weaponize central authority to standardize innovation.

Thus, this motu proprio is structurally Modernist: it creates the levers by which the “conciliar sect” later executes the liturgical revolution, under the pretext of “obedience” to offices they no longer hold in truth.

Symptomatic Dimension: Rubricarum instructum as Proto-Novus Ordo Manifesto

Seen in the broader historical and doctrinal context, this document is emblematic, not isolated.

1. Alignment with the condemned Modernist instinct

Lamentabili sane exitu condemns the idea that dogma and cult evolve in such a way that their previous forms can be discarded once a new “stage of consciousness” is reached; it condemns subjection of revealed realities to historical pragmatism.

Rubricarum instructum enacts in practice what the Modernists theorized:

– It treats the received form of the Roman liturgy as raw material for “systematic” reworking.
– It prioritizes human considerations (“simplification,” “pastoral burdens”) over the jealous custody of sacral inheritance.
– It relativizes immemorial custom before a current “project of reform.”

Even before the 1969 fabrication of a non-Catholic rite, this 1960 act is a moral and theological rehearsal of apostasy: the acceptance that what was always venerated as untouchable can be administratively redesigned.

2. Preparation for the cult of man and religious indifferentism

The same milieu that produces this motu proprio will rapidly:

– Call and direct an “ecumenical council” that enthrones religious liberty, false ecumenism, and the cult of man.
– Construct a new “mass” that dilutes sacrificial and propitiatory language, making room for Protestantized and syncretic interpretations.

A mentality that dares to revoke immemorial liturgical customs merely for stylistic tidiness has already inwardly rejected the principles taught by Pius IX in the Syllabus and by Pius XI in Quas primas, where:

– The public cult owed to Christ the King is non-negotiable;
– The Church’s law and liturgy stand above the fashions of “modern civilization” (Syllabus prop. 80).

Rubricarum instructum is thus a transitional text of the paramasonic structure: formally Latin, materially imbued with the idea that worship exists to be molded at will, an idea perfectly suited to a neo-church that will later adore human dignity instead of the crucified King.

3. Practical Undermining of the Clergy’s Supernatural Identity

By reducing the Office and framing it as a burden to be eased, Roncalli participates in dissolving the supernatural identity of clergy:

– The priest ceases to be first of all a man of sacrifice and psalmody, to become a social functionary.
– Once the objective framework of long, God-centred prayer is shortened, the door opens to activism, secular psychology, horizontal “pastoral” experiments.

It is not accidental that in the wake of these reforms, vocations wither, religious life collapses, and the so-called clergy of the conciliar sect become administrators, entertainers, or ideological agents, no longer men consumed by the Divine Office and the *Unbloody Sacrifice.*

Exposure of the Core Bankruptcy

The spiritual and doctrinal bankruptcy of Rubricarum instructum can be distilled in several antitheses.

– The Catholic view: *The liturgy is received, not manufactured*.
– Roncalli’s act: **The liturgy is a codebase to be refactored.**

– The Catholic view: *Immemorial customs embody the faith and are to be guarded with dread reverence*.
– Roncalli’s act: **Immemorial customs are obstacles to uniform managerial design.**

– The Catholic view: *Priestly life flows from choir and altar; “burdens” of prayer are glories*.
– Roncalli’s act: **Prayer is a workload to be optimized so that priests can be busier “pastorally.”**

– The Catholic view: *Fathers of the Church form, through the Office, the very mind of clergy and faithful*.
– Roncalli’s act: **Reduce their presence in the official prayer; console with a gentle exhortation to read privately.**

– The Catholic view: *Authority is bounded by Tradition; the Pope is the servant, not the proprietor, of the rites*.
– Roncalli’s act: **Claim a de facto proprietary right to revoke even immemorial rites en bloc.**

This motu proprio thereby reveals itself as a juridical and symbolic self-excommunication from the Catholic liturgical spirit. Its author, by usurping power over that which does not belong to him to reshape, manifests the principle articulated by theologians such as St Robert Bellarmine and others cited in the defense of sedevacantism: a manifest heretic or one who attempts to destroy the Church’s constitution ceases to hold authority, since he cannot be head of that of which he proves himself enemy.

Although Rubricarum instructum still moves within the forms of the traditional rite, it is the Trojan horse of a mentality foreign to the Church: the mentality that will, step by calculated step, lead to the abomination of desolation on the altars—an entirely man-made, theologically poisoned rite imposed by a conciliar sect occupying the Vatican.

Conclusion: A Pre-Conciliar Mask for a Post-Catholic Agenda

Rubricarum instructum is often sold, even among those pretending to be traditional Catholics, as a “harmless” or “moderate” tidying-up. Such apologetics ignore its real character:

– It is the first coherent legislative blow that:
– Wields papal and curial authority against liturgical immemorial custom;
– Makes “simplification” a principle of reform rather than a cautious exception;
– Centrally programs compliance for all rites and calendars in view of a broader “general liturgical reform.”

– Its language, omissions, and structural decisions match, point for point, what pre-1958 Magisterium condemned in Modernism:
– Naturalistic and functional criteria for sacred worship;
– Historical-technical rationalization of what is handed down;
– Loss of fear before the sacred deposit; exaltation of managerial voluntarism.

It stands, therefore, not as an expression of the indefectible Catholic Church, but as an early, eloquent self-indictment of the paramasonic structure that would soon—through the false “ecumenical council” and fabricated rites—attempt to replace the Kingdom of Christ the King, so solemnly asserted by Pius XI, with the kingdom of man, dialogue, and apostasy.

Whoever loves the Roman Rite as the lex orandi of the true Church must recognize in this text not a legitimate development, but a warning sign: the moment when those occupying the heights of authority began, calmly and in Latin, to saw through the very branch on which liturgical and doctrinal continuity rests.

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Source:
Rubricarum instructum, Litterae Apostolicae Motu Proprio Datae Novum Rubricarum Breviarii et Missalis Romani Corpus approbatur, XXV Iulii MCMLX, Ioannes PP. XXIII   (vatican.va)
Date: 11.11.2025